People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is undoubtedly a very successful animal advocacy group. Combining a well-funded budget with a large activist base, it has effectively forced many large corporations to change practices that it deems are cruel to animals. Yet while it has achieved many successes, it has done so with a strategy that often includes radical tactics and offensive propaganda. Moreover, this unorthodox organization has often undercut the very cause for animal rights that it purports to uphold.

There is an excellent argument to be made for the responsible treatment of animals designated for human use. Unfortunately, PETA has not been making it. It doesn’t run an animal welfare campaign; it runs an animal liberation campaign and there is a profound difference between the two that carries drastic social and economic ramifications. Instead of calling for fair treatment of animals destined for human use, PETA considers any use of animals to be a morally reprehensible affair. Its reasoning is that an animal has the same set of fundamental rights provided to a human being, and that it subsequently must be protected just as any person should. Consequently, PETA’s ideal vision is not the regulation of industry practices that utilize animals, but the complete annihilation of them. This means the end of meat consumption, dairy products, leather shoes, wool production, zoos, fishing, animal testing for medical research, and even pets.

It goes without mentioning the sheer misery that PETA would create if it got its way. But it pushes on without regard to the numerous benefits provided by animals, a fact highlighted by PETA president Ingrid Newkirk’s oft-mentioned admission that “even if animal research resulted in a cure for AIDS, we’d be against it.” Such an extreme ideology has not been very popular in a country that heavily consumes animal products. In fact, a 2003 Gallup poll found that only 25 percent of Americans believe in PETA’s fundamental theme that animals deserve the same rights given to people.

To combat such an overwhelming current of popular opinion, PETA has often relied on smash mouth tactics designed to shock people into taking notice. Techniques such as throwing red paint on people who wear fur coats and distributing books to children titled “Your Mommy Kills Animals!” are carefully designed to garner publicity for their cause and tilt popular opinion in their favor. But the campaigns themselves are often seriously offensive, such as the infamous “Holocaust on Your Plate” billboard campaign that photographically compared animal slaughterhouses with Nazi death camps. PETA later issued a retraction for the ads and it was indeed a touching gesture for Newkirk to apologize for the campaign’s claims, such as one that stated that “the leather sofa and handbag are the moral equivalent of the lampshades made from the skins of people killed in the death camps.”

Yet her statement only apologized for the “pain” caused by the campaign’s assertions. It did nothing to demonstrate that the organization now believed those assertions were wrong. In fact, only two years after PETA issued the apology, a new “Animal Liberation Project” is now touring the country comparing the plight of animals with the forced relocation of Native Americans, the oppression of women, and the practice of slavery. The essential wrongness in all of this is PETA’s insistence that an animal’s life is just as sacred as a human being’s. After all, the choice between saving a human being and saving an animal is an obvious one.

Zookeeper Ron Magill of the Miami Metro Zoo inadvertently offered an unusually direct critique of PETA’s message during an interview on Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC show, “The Situation,” to discuss the plight of animals in New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina. He stated, “Folks, you have to keep something in mind. There is no single animal life that’s more important than a human life.” That PETA lacks a similar perspective on animal rights is very unfortunate because its extreme message drives away many moderates who would otherwise be very receptive to advocates of the humane treatment of animals. The conditions of many slaughterhouses, and the crude practices of certain animal testing procedures, have demonstrated that there is a need for a watchdog system to monitor and, if necessary, improve the living conditions of animals designated for human use. This is not what PETA has in mind, though, when it campaigns for animal liberation.

No reasonable person will ever claim that animal abuse is not morally reprehensible. But juxtaposing the life of a cow with the life of a human being, and declaring no fundamental moral difference between them, is equally despicable. PETA should know better. Unfortunately it has become too wrapped up in its own radical crusade to really understand that.

Nathan is a sophomore in the School of Engineering.

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